1. Technical Field
One or more embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to providing digital content. More specifically, one or more embodiments disclosed herein relate to systems and methods for creating and maintaining a dynamic cache of digital content items on a client device.
2. Background and Relevant Art
Computing devices (e.g., computers, tablets, smart phones) provide numerous ways for people to capture, create, share, view, and otherwise interact with numerous types of digital content. For example, many computing devices allow users to interact with digital content by capturing, sharing, and experiencing digital images and videos. Overtime, a typical user can collect a large amount of digital content. As the amount of digital content increases, it becomes more difficult for the user to locally store and view each piece of digital content on a computing device. In particular, conventional systems for storing and experiencing digital content have several disadvantages.
For example, many conventional systems only present a portion of a digital content collection to a user on a computing device because the computing device providing the digital content collection to the user has a limited storage capacity and cannot hold the entire digital content collection. As such, because the size of the digital content collection is larger than the allocated space on the computing device that stores the digital content collection, a user cannot navigate to and view every digital content item in a digital content collection because many of the digital content items are missing.
In addition, in many conventional systems, as a user adds digital content items to his or her digital content collection, the size of the digital content collection grows. On a computing device, as the size of the digital content collection grows, the capacity to store other items on the computing device decreases. Many conventional systems will continue to add digital content items and occupy available storage space on the computing device until the storage space is full. As a result, the computing device does not have room to store other external data, such as applications and application data that is separate from the digital content collection.
Furthermore, when the storage space on a computing device is full, conventional systems do not allow a user to add additional digital content items to the digital content collection until the user manually removes digital content items from the digital content collection or removes other stored data from the computing device. Having to constantly remove, and possibly lose, older digital content items in the digital content collection before being able to add additional digital content items to a digital content collection can be time consuming, inefficient, and frustrating for a user.
Additionally, when adding digital content items to a digital content collection, a user must often wait for the digital content items to be identified, downloaded, and organized on a computing device. In some instances, conventional systems do not begin the process of obtaining and adding digital content items to a digital content collection on a computing device until a user manually initiates the process. Further, after manually initiating the process, the user may wait for each digital content item to be identified, downloaded, and organized before the user is presented with one or more of the additional digital content items. Waiting for conventional systems to present each additional digital content item can also be time consuming and frustrating to a user.
Accordingly, there are a number of considerations to be made in providing and maintaining a digital content collection.